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AI Decoded
How Artificial Intelligence Actually Works
What Is AI?
Show it 1,000 photos of cats and it learns what a cat looks like.
Show it millions of sentences and it learns how language works.
Three Types of AI
Narrow AI
Excels at one specific task
We Are Here
General AI
Human-level reasoning
Theoretical
Super AI
Beyond human intelligence
Science Fiction
The AI Timeline
1950
Turing Test proposed
1997
Deep Blue beats chess champion
2011
Siri launches on iPhone
2017
Transformers paper published
2024
Claude, Gemini, open-source explosion
2026
AI agents everywhere
How AI Learns
Data
Books, images, text, code
Training
Patterns are learned
AI Model
Ready to generate
What Are Tokens?
"The cat sat on the mat"
6 tokens
AI doesn't read words like we do. It breaks text into small pieces called tokens — then processes each one mathematically.
What Is a Prompt?
You write
"Write me a short poem about dogs"
AI responds
A loyal friend with wagging tail,
Through sun and snow and rain and hail,
With gentle eyes that never fail...
Models & Weights
Billions of tiny numerical knobs, each fine-tuned through training.
Together, they encode everything the model has learned.
GPT-4
Claude
Llama
DeepSeek
Now you understand how AI works.
AI Decoded
Learn more in the full course